The most beautifully scuffed prose of the decade. Maybe.

Read the opening pages of the Miles Franklin award-winner below ^ Plus Parts 32 and 33 of The Demon Inside David Lynch

In today’s issue:

—’His stories were too much for a brain, rolling in stitches up there, like he was spinning some ancestor power, and you wanted him to stop telling stories like that, he got no business, but him telling them repeatedly all the same and never stopping, yep, right, like he was the national newspaper, or something called social media cancelling everybody else, and all the while only ever predicting nothing good would come out of a worldwide doom’: the opening pages of Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy, the winner of this year’s Miles Franklin Award for best Australian novel, and one of the greatest examples this decade of elegantly scuffed prose.

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